Willow Glen Movers- (408) 625-4868: December 2018

It’s finally here: moving day! You’ve planned, organized, found the perfect moving company, packed everything up, donated what you don’t need, and are ready to get out of your old place and into your new home or apartment! Awesome, right!? Well, we hate to break it to you, but there’s still a few things left to do before you can say goodbye to your old digs and start new. To help you out, we’ve complied a moving day checklist with a list of everything you need to get out in the quickest and most efficient way possible. Read on for more tips on how to have a successful moving day.

#1 Wake up early

No matter what time your move is, you’ll need to wake up early on moving day. Even if you packed everything and did all of the organizing, there’s always some last-minute thing to do. To avoid unnecessary stress, you want to make sure that you give yourself enough time before the movers get to your home.

#2 Pack any last-minute items

Even if you pack everything up before your actual move, there will still be a few items left. After your shower, pack up all of your bathroom items and then pack up your kitchen perishables. Consider throwing anything out that will melt or go bad during the duration of your move.

#3 Do a final sweep of your home

Before the movers arrive, go through your home one more time. Make sure that you visit every room, checking the cabinets, closets and storage spaces. If you have a large home, you want to make sure that you check the basement, attic, driveway or your guest house.

#4 Greet your movers

Once your movers arrive give them a walkthrough of your house or apartment, highlighting any fragile boxes or the furniture pieces that you need to have disassembled. Ideally, your boxes would be clearly labeled but it’s always a good idea to discuss what you want and not assume your movers will know how you want everything loaded. Make sure to also have water on-hand for them and show them where your bathroom is, which they might need during the moving process.

#5 Moderate the move

Plan to stay around as your movers load up the boxes. They might have questions about the move and it could give you a peace of mind to watch how everything is placed on the moving truck.

#6 Final sweep

Once everything is loaded up onto the moving van, look around your home one more time. You might have some garbage to take out, or in some instances you might have to clean your place before you leave. Consider hiring a cleaning company to do this part or if you have to clean it, enlist some friends to help you. Once everything is done, lock your door and head to your new home.

#7 Go to your new place

It’s time to head to your new place! Be in touch with your movers during this process. They might have traffic issues, took a different route or simply needed to stop for lunch. Being in touch during the process is crucial so that you have an estimated time frame for when they are heading to your new home.

#8 Guide the movers

Wait for the movers at your new home, then give them a walkthrough to your new home. Let them know what room each boxes should go in. During this process, you’ll also want to make sure that you have food and water for your movers.

#9 Tip your movers

After all of the boxes are in your house and your furniture is reassembled, it’s time to tip your movers. While this is optional, it is a nice thing to do after a long day of lugging, lifting and putting together your furniture. The movers also work as a team where the driver would divide the tip amongst the group. Consider this as you factor in how you felt that they did during the entire moving process.

#10 Unpack only the essentials

Once your movers leave, unpack some of the essentials that you will need that evening of the next day. This will likely include your bathroom essentials like your toothbrush, toothpaste, fast wash and soap, kitchen items, PJs and an outfit for the next day.

#11 Put your curtains up

You likely won’t be doing that much unpacking on the first day, especially if your move took all day. Consider unpacking and hanging up your curtains to help you to avoid the morning light. You’ll have a lot to do in the upcoming days where you’ll need as much sleep as possible to keep you energized and rested.

#12 Finally relax

It’s been a long and exciting day. Take the time to finally chill and relax. Consider getting takeout and relaxing with a book, or get some fresh air by grabbing a bite in your new area.

Moving can be a really stressful experience. One way to ensure that everything runs smoothly is to create a moving day checklist. This can allow you to streamline your moving day as you focus, making sure that you complete the remaining things left to do. It is also a huge help so that you don’t forget anything before you head to your new place.

One night last month, while I was in the midst of moving out of the house where I had lived for nearly a decade, I found myself trying to make dinner with two pans, one fork and one knife — the only things I had not yet packed that were useful.

To distract myself from this sorry state, I turned on an episode of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and saw a father and son suddenly thrown into moving mode. A house flipper had knocked on their door and offered them cash to get out ASAP. But they were shown calmly putting random items into boxes that didn’t look as if they had been salvaged from a grocery or liquor store — as were most of my boxes — after which they stopped to have a leisurely heart-to-heart talk.

“That’s not how this works,” I yelled at my iPad, which was on top of the TV tray where I would eat while sitting on a paint-splattered folding chair, since I had just sold my dining-room set on Craigslist.

The move was one of the most stressful experiences of my life, in part because of all the moving parts involved — I had sold my house much more quickly than expected and needed to find a rental and storage on short notice — but also because moving isn’t something most of us do very often.

Richard S. Citrin, an organizational psychologist and a writer of “The Resilience Advantage,” said: “We build routines to make things as efficient as we can. When we move, we do something very foreign to us.”

We don’t have a routine for hiring a mover. We don’t have a routine for how to pack the dishes or bed linens. We just don’t have a routine for upending our lives.

It all “takes a lot of mental and physical energy, and that expenditure of energy is very exhausting,” Mr. Citrin said.

While you probably can’t stop the stress that comes from the process, you can make your move easier — and also do your best not to get ripped off by moving companies.

Time, Energy and Delays

Whether you’re paying friends with pizza and a six-pack, or hiring a company to handle packing and moving, the process still takes time — and typically much more time than you anticipate.

If you’re hiring a mover, Scott Michael, president and chief executive of the American Moving and Storage Association, an industry trade group that offers advice on its website, Moving.org, suggests calling at least three companies two months ahead. This gives you enough time to evaluate their estimates, research them through the Better Business Bureau and look them up on consumer review websites like Angie’s List and Yelp.

Mr. Michael advised looking for a physical address and, if it is a local moving company, drive by the business. (The Haggler, The New York Times’ business column, has delved into hellish moving-related experiences some have had with companies that exist only on the internet.) You can also search for complaints against moving companies on the Department of Transportation website.

When Amanda Goldman-Petri and her family moved from Conroe, Tex., to Bradenton, Fla., in 2015, they went through three movers.

John Shabe and his wife, Tracey Randinelli, with a print by the cartoonist Walt Kelly, which they found — along with leftover debris — when they did the final walk-through of the home they were buying in South Orange, N.J.CreditDavid Handschuh for The New York Times

The first company gave them a quote and, on moving day, showed up late and doubled the charge. She fired them. The second left half the family’s stuff behind and sent an invoice for more than the quoted price. “We, of course, refused,” Mrs. Goldman-Petri said. “They then held our items hostage in a warehouse.”

Mrs. Goldman-Petri then hired a third moving company to pick up their items from the warehouse. She said they overmeasured (and overcharged), and broke some items.

She said that if she ever hired movers again, she would check the company on the Transportation Department website.

Mrs. Goldman-Petri said her family had moved a few times before, but this was their first move across state lines. “We weren’t educated on the difference between local versus national movers, so didn’t expect it to be an issue,” she said.

The next time they moved (from their rental into a home they bought last year), they did it themselves.

Buying, Selling and Setbacks

I thought negotiating a sale price for my house with buyers would be the toughest part of the process. Not so. My broker and the buyer’s broker were in constant contact about everything, from what repairs I would make to whether or not the buyer wanted to buy any of the furniture in the house.

The author, who sold her house more quickly than she had anticipated, at her rental in Cape May. N.J. She plans to live there for two months while figuring out her next move.CreditMarc Steiner for The New York Times

My broker ended up being a shoulder to lean on, and sometimes to cry on.

“Sometimes Realtors have to be psychologists in order to evaluate and understand their clients’ situation and react accordingly,” said Bill Brown, president of the National Association of Realtors.

So when I sobbed about my buyer’s change in financing, my broker knew that I wasn’t upset just about that, but also about this being yet another unexpected bump on the road to selling the home, one that already included the death of my Jack Russell terrier, Emily. I had bought the home, in part, so she would have a yard.

(The financing hiccup involved the buyer’s deciding to switch from a conventional mortgage to one through the Federal Housing Administration, which meant another appraisal. This could have moved back the closing date. But I had already signed a lease for my next place that started on the scheduled closing day, which could have meant that I’d have to pay both a mortgage and a lease at the same time. Fortunately, none of the feared upheaval came to pass.)

‘‘Anytime you have been living in a place, memories are there,” Mr. Brown said, adding that you should be able to rely on your broker for almost anything during the process (mine also helped me find a plumber to fix two faucets and a contractor to replace broken window panes). The only thing a broker should not give, Mr. Brown said, is legal and accounting advice.

In some places, like where I lived in southern New Jersey, buyers and sellers don’t bring lawyers into the process. In New York City, though, a lawyer will almost always be involved.

As for the part a lawyer plays in the transaction, Douglas P. Heller, a real estate lawyer at Herrick, Feinstein in Manhattan, said: “For the buyer, the role is to get what you paid for. For the seller, the role is to make sure nobody can come after you at the end of the day because you screwed up.”

For co-ops, being approved by the board can be another hurdle, Mr. Heller said. Buyers should seek co-op approval as soon as possible, especially if they want to close their deal in June, for example, and the board meets only twice a year.

Deals can still be scuttled on the last day — or wind up costing someone more money. When John Shabe and his wife, Tracey Randinelli, did the final walk-through of the home they were buying in South Orange, N.J., in 2001, the place was broom swept, “but you definitely saw little piles of dirt on the kitchen floor where they didn’t use a dust pan to pick it up,” Mr. Shabe said. That was just the start: they also found food in the refrigerator, rolls of paintings and canvases in the basement, and oil drums loaded with junk in the garage.

The couple didn’t feel as if they could back out of the deal because their things were already loaded onto the moving truck. “We weren’t going to not move because of this,” Mr. Shabe said, so they asked for a credit at the closing to pay for junk removal, which in the end cost double what they expected.

One bright spot: In sorting through what the previous owners left behind, they found a print by Walt Kelly, the cartoonist of the comic strip “Pogo,” rolled up and left behind. They had it appraised and framed, and it still hangs in their home. (The 2004 appraisal was $300.)

In the End ...

Because my house went into contract just a week after I listed it and the deal closed in two months, and I was still paralyzed with grief over losing my dog, I moved most of my stuff into a storage unit, and myself into a furnished, short-term rental in Cape May, N.J.

After signing what seemed like 10,002 papers to release a home I had loved to someone else, I got into my old Jeep Wrangler and drove, white-knuckled, through snow and howling wind to the condo. I dumped my duffel bag and backpack in the living room and promptly realized that the sheets I brought didn’t fit the supplied bed.

I still haven’t completely unwound, and I haven’t 100 percent unpacked either — I’m writing this at a kitchen counter with my laptop on top of an old dynamite crate that used to hold my paper recycling.

At the end of my two-month lease, I’ll have to figure out what’s next. At least I won’t have to worry about a buyer changing his financing this time.

Willow Glen Movers- (408) 625-4868

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

The Ultimate Moving Day Checklist